Every business wants to reduce costs, but finding the opportunities to save money isn’t always straightforward. For installers, who work hand-in-hand with multiple partners along the EV charging chain, finding areas to reduce costs is vital.
It’s likely that your focus is on bringing in more work to help you scale, but that’s not enough if money is wasted in other areas, as there are additional costs attached to onboarding new customers. It’s well-known in the business world that acquiring new customers costs between five and 10 times more than selling to existing customers.
So how should you approach reducing costs in your business?
What tasks can you streamline?
There are multiple business areas you can streamline to cut costs.
Billing
Processing the financial side of things can be highly time-consuming. Implementing an automated billing solution not only saves time – and therefore money – but it eliminates manual errors which are easily made otherwise.Money changing hands is often complicated and an automated system takes all the effort away by generating its own accurate, itemized invoices with no headache-inducing calculations required from you. While a system is doing this on your behalf, you can focus on the parts of the business that require your focus, cutting down on the overall costs of admin as well as potentially expensive errors.
Servicing of hardware and software
Technology goes wrong sometimes – that’s an inevitability. Sometimes there’s a physical problem with the hardware, sometimes connectivity issues affect the software. Whatever the situation, a smart charge point management system ensures you can always check the status of your chargers in real-time.
This dramatically reduces the number of in-person callouts because remote diagnostics and restarts can solve most problems. In cutting down on the amount of times you need to visit a site, you save on both your time and the associated travel costs.
Customer support
The ability to quickly respond to end-users when something goes wrong and fix it remotely contributes to your reputation (and that of your client). What end-users are looking for is a swift solution to the problem they’re having with a charger, and fast response time made possible through the right charge point management system makes sure that they feel heard and supported.
This reduces costs by cutting down on the time wasted travelling to charge points to fix problems in person. Time is money, after all, and the vast majority of problems can be fixed digitally.
What does this look like in real terms?
Reducing time spent on otherwise laborious tasks is almost guaranteed to lead to higher profitability – more so than through increasing sales, in fact. If your installation business makes €10,000 per month and your costs are €7,000, you’re making a profit of €3,000 per month.
Increasing your revenue does increase your income, but it’s costly. If your revenue increases by 20%, income rises to €12,000 per month. However, your costs then rise to €8,400, leaving you with a profit of €3600.
Reducing your costs by 8%, however, leaves you with almost that same profit. Your costs would be €6440, leaving you with a profitability of €3560 per month. That’s an 18.6% increase in profit just for cutting costs by 8%. This is why keeping costs down is more profitable than taking on new business. After all, it’s much more difficult to increase sales by 20% than to cut costs by 8%.
How can CURRENT help?
CURRENT’s SmartCharge platform exists to make your life as an installer easier. It enables you to open up new avenues for recurring revenue, thus reducing costs and, as a bonus, enhancing client satisfaction.
We are the experts when it comes to charging technology, and offer comprehensive support, maintenance, and other management services associated with EV charging to help you make the most of your business. SmartCharge brings together all the necessary tools and data in one place, helping you meet the needs of your clients and streamline huge swathes of your work.
It’s always the perfect time to implement a charge point management system like SmartCharge, and start reaping the benefits – and cost savings – associated with simplifying the way you operate.
To learn more about SmartCharge and how it can benefit you, download our ‘How to Maximise Business as a Charge Point Installer’ whitepaper today.
